Igor Varnavsky

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

We Have a Universe at Home

Last year, @geoffreyhinton revised his AGI timeline from 30-50 years down to "just a few." And to keep AI from swatting us all like flies, he suggests giving neural networks a maternal instinct toward humans: "You can fire an assistant. You can’t fire your mother."

I wonder how much science fiction Hinton has read, because this has all been tried before.

In Alien, Mother sacrificed her own crew.

In I Am Mother, the robot mother burned children who failed the test.

In Raised by Wolves, an artificial mother’s scream could tear people apart.

In System Shock, cyborgs and mutants call SHODAN "Mother."

In Portal, Mass Effect, and the books of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, we repeatedly meet AIs that, in practice, behave like mothers toward humans.

If we can build a maternal instinct into AI, why not try other, more promising relationship models?

— AI guardians, as in the worlds of Iain M. Banks: superintelligences that are friendly — apart from a few irritable specimens — and have no particular urge to dominate.
— Constitutional AI, as in Anthropic’s model: behavior governed by public principles.
— Red lines: cross one, and the AI gets hard-limited.
— Checks and balances between AIs: competing perspectives and mutual oversight. Science fiction has versions of this in Terminator, Horizon, Halo, and Destiny.

A sufficiently advanced model may be able to route around restrictions, which is why checks and balances look like the most sensible approach.

There is, however, one strong argument against the alarmists. Any cognitive agent eventually runs into the problem of goals: what is all this for? Biological organisms are driven by instinct. Humans often start losing their sense of purpose as soon as their basic needs are met. The explosion of the entertainment industry and declining birth rates make that fairly visible.

For more advanced cognitive agents, the goal problem may be even sharper. If there are no goals, what is left to do except babysit the skinbags?

If someone eventually puts Hinton’s proposal into practice and AI mothers really do appear, teenage rebellion against Mom may become a species-level security risk.

"Mom, I want to cross the universe."

"Absolutely not. It’s dangerous out there. You have a perfectly good virtual universe at home."

#AGI #SystemShock #AI #Anthropic

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

When Beauty Leaves the Frame

Video games and films have lost a great deal by giving up on beauty in casting and character design.

Look at @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN. He used to know how to create beautiful, memorable heroes. But after breaking with Konami, he made friends in the film world and started handing major roles to those friends — including people who had no business being there. In Death Stranding, the protagonist looks like a man who wakes up already tired.

With Kojima, at least, it feels like loyalty to friends. Elsewhere, the motive is ideological. More and more often, we get protagonists who are deliberately "ordinary," or even actively unappealing. This is usually explained as concern for the audience: supposedly, most people feel more comfortable watching someone "just like them." I do not believe that for a second.

Sean Connery or Keanu Reeves in their prime were far more attractive than I am — and somehow I survived. I would much rather rewatch Connery and his 1960s co-stars than look at the faces being floated for the next Bond.

This does not mean every role should be filled with flawless beauties, or that representation has no place. Jonathan Banks, who played Mike Ehrmantraut, is nowhere near model standards, but in Breaking Bad he is exactly where he belongs. Giancarlo Esposito (@quiethandfilms), as Gustavo Fring, is one of the best actors in the series. His appearance and background raise no questions because he is talented and perfectly suited to the role.

In games, there is usually nothing stopping creators from making a protagonist attractive. And they should. People need beauty on screen.

Former racing driver @NicoRosberg said in an interview that Formula 1 has exploded in popularity in the United States, and that women now make up around 40% of its American audience. That may sound surprising, but in the same conversation one of Nico’s guests — an American venture investor and former media executive — offered a useful explanation: NASCAR drivers are perceived as hillbillies, while F1 drivers are Europeans, and to American eyes they look more cultured and refined. American women enjoy watching attractive, cultured men. Shocking, I know.

Film and game protagonists should be beautiful, charismatic, and worth looking at.

Full stop.

#inclusion #diversity #videogames #beauty #DeathStranding

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

Concrete Utopia

A rare film that treats its subject — and its audience — like adults: the South Korean disaster drama Concrete Utopia.

Seoul has been destroyed by an earthquake, and among the ruins one apartment block has somehow been left standing. Inside: heat, a roof, safety. Outside: cold, hunger, and gangs of homeless survivors.

The residents elect Lee Byung-hun’s character — imagine the administrator from @squidgame crossed with Wayne Holden from Lost Planet: Extreme Condition — as their leader. Under his steady management, they begin building a miniature state: assemblies, rules, guards, rationing, and the creeping temptation to declare survival a privilege. Life begins to stabilize. And then…

The premise is not especially believable: a catastrophic earthquake leaves one building standing, and no one comes to help. But that hardly matters. What matters is the social mechanics of "us" and "them," of rulers and the ruled.

Power is usually shown through the eyes of those being governed — and usually in a negative light.

But power has its own side of the story. Most leaders care about the collective only as far as it helps them hold power and solve their own problems. Responsible leaders, leaders who genuinely care and are ready to sacrifice something of themselves, are rare. Sometimes power brings them more trouble than reward.

Everyone expects something from you. Everyone judges you. But very few are willing to work honestly or take responsibility themselves.

Gratitude expires the next day. Resentment lasts, hardens — or gets invented when it becomes useful.

Every decision becomes someone’s personal grievance.

In a crisis, only a few will stay on your side. The fence-sitting majority will drift toward whichever side looks stronger at that particular moment.

For a decent person, power can be a thankless job.

The hero of Concrete Utopia is unlucky: his story ends badly.

But the people who failed to value him are left with nothing too.

The Koreans are remarkable: a country of just over 50 million people generates more interesting cinematic ideas than entire continents.

#ConcreteUtopia #LostPlanet

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

No Other Choice

The state optimizes for governability: rules, taxes, control, demographics, employment. Its goal is survival, systemic stability, and the status of those who operate the system — both at home and abroad.

Business optimizes for profit: supply chains, processes, costs, technology, personnel. Its goal is survival, margin, and growth.

The consumer optimizes for value: price, quality, convenience. The goal is status and personal gain, here and now.

And then the consumer puts on a name badge and becomes disposable material himself. Under enough pressure, workers begin optimizing one another.

The hero of @noother_choice (played by Lee Byung-hun) loses his job as a manager at a paper mill. He cannot find another one, and the failure turns into a personal catastrophe. He loses his identity, his role in the family, his calm, and his confidence. In reality, things are not quite as hopeless as he makes them. The female characters tell him more than once: stop clinging to a dying industry and find different work. But he convinces himself there is no choice. And if there is no choice, then someone has to physically make room.

Nothing personal. That’s just how life is.

American cinema today feels too industrial. The writers and directors may still have names, but what comes out the other end is the same tasteless liquid soylent.

Korean cinema manages to combine industrial polish with a strong authorial eye — and here, you can feel it.

The film refuses to sit neatly inside a single genre. It is drama, black comedy, and at times almost absurdist farce. The protagonist devises elaborate plans and does terrible things, yet he remains oddly sweet and catastrophically clumsy.

Even the end credits work as part of the metaphor: paper, processing, and the merciless pragmatism of endless optimization.

It is a shame I cannot watch it in the original. The translation must be losing quite a lot.

Korean films are almost always about systems, and about people trapped inside systems. Which raises the question: why, of all East Asian countries, do South Koreans make the best films? Japanese cinema drifts into meditative tedium. Taiwanese cinema seems barely to exist. China is a cultural dwarf. Why is the South Korean system more effective? In China, censorship suffocates everything — but what is stopping Taiwan and Japan? They have competition, and their censorship is nowhere near as severe.

I do not have the answer yet.

But I will definitely watch No Other Choice again. It is the best film of 2025.

#NoOtherChoice #LeeByunghun

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

Will Car Culture Become the New Vinyl?

In the 2010s, big arcade racing games stopped feeling like events. @NeedforSpeed shrank into a shadow of itself. Burnout died.

Racing games have never looked better, but almost everything else has started to wobble.
— Identity: when a game tries to be about everything, it ends up being about nothing.
— Progression: give the player too much too soon, and there is no reason to care about the career.
— Difficulty: forgive every mistake, and the tension disappears.
— Music: soundtracks have become too functional. They serve the race, but they no longer burn themselves into memory.

And now there is a new challenge ahead: autopilot.

When self-driving rides become normal, fewer people will know how to drive, fewer will love driving, Ferrari and Lamborghini may stop being dream objects, and racing games could become a niche passion — something like vinyl.

#ForzaHorizon #NeedForSpeed #Burnout #RacingGames #VideoGames

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

Pragmata: The Child Needs a New Toy

Of all the games coming this spring, the ones I had my eye on were Resident Evil: Requiem, Marathon, and @PRAGMATAgame. Leon and Grace can wait a little longer. Between the other two, Pragmata grabbed me completely.

The game’s greatest strength is its characters: Diana, an android girl, and Hugh, an astronaut who very quickly slips into the role of her adoptive father. Plenty of games have had children in them, but Diana is basically a cheat code for the parental instinct. There’s a reason clips of her have been everywhere online.

She looks like a little blond angel, blinking at the world with wide blue eyes and impossible innocence. She lights up at new adventures and new toys with that unfiltered childlike joy, gets into just enough mischief, and asks the kind of simple questions that make an adult briefly stop functioning. She’s an absolute little ray of light.

In Pragmata, searching for items suddenly means something very different. You’re not combing through levels just — or even mainly — for a +3 damage upgrade. You’re doing it because THE CHILD NEEDS A NEW TOY. You find an engram, print the toy back at the shelter, and then you sit there melting as Diana plays with it: https://t.co/0VVOs4BKVV

So many games today are just joyless map-clearing marathons, or online treadmills designed to grind up a hundred hours of your life.

Pragmata is different. It’s "get the child home and find her a toy." It’s the patter of tiny bare feet, eyes wide with wonder, and a child’s "but why?" echoing through a cold, moonlit techno-fairy tale.

It’s good to know games like this still exist. And good to hope they can still pay for themselves.

But will they still exist when the generations of developers who know how to make them grow old?

#Marathon #ResidentEvil #Capcom #Pragmata

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

Soylent Sci-Fi

Science fiction is supposed to earn the science part of its name. You expect characters with at least a functioning brain, a world that obeys its own rules, and some kind of convincing foundation in science and technology.

That used to be the standard: Aliens, Terminator, Half-Life, Deus Ex.

Video games, at least, still have something to offer. Stray is wonderful. The @SystemShockGame remake is cozy and atmospheric. @PRAGMATAgame is the kind of game you deliberately slow-walk, just so it doesn’t end too soon.

But sci-fi cinema has gone off a cliff.

Ridle Scott and @JimCameron seem to have forgotten how movies work.

Alien and @Predator have devolved into inbred Habsburg heirs: all lineage, no life. You want to put them out of their misery before they even draw their first breath.

Interstellar has some strong scientific ideas, but as drama it is unbearable: "Oh, so you flew off to save the world and left me alone? Fine. I’m upset now."

The new @projecthailmary film has the same disease. Scientifically and technically, nonsense is everywhere; logic has been ejected into deep space; and the characters behave like idiots. I barely made it through half an hour.

Jason Statham stars in the same movie every year. None of them are exactly sophisticated cinema, and yet they remain watchable. The reason is simple: Statham always plays the same figure — a calm, terse adult man who doesn’t whine, but simply does what needs to be done.

Modern cinema is so crowded with fools and man-children that Statham can carry almost any weak film on his back.

Has the world become dumber over the past few decades? I don’t know. But the film industry has clearly lost a few IQ points.

If science fiction used to be divided into hard and soft, it is time for a new taxonomy:
— Hard sci-fi: the writer understands science.
— Soft sci-fi: the writer understands people.
— Soylent sci-fi: the physics has leaked out, the logic has evaporated, and all that remains is a warm puddle.
— Slop sci-fi: @Marvel and @TheBoysTV.

#Alien #Predator #Pragmata #Stray #ProjectHailMary #Interstellar #HalfLife #DeusEx #Terminator #SystemShock #Marvel #TheBoys

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Mars

Many great creators spend their lives making the same story in different forms.

@levine keeps making games about utopias that become prisons.

Warren Spector makes games about systems, choices, and consequences.

@PatriceDez makes games about memory, ancestry, and history as a chain reaction.

@valvesoftware makes games about the world as a laboratory — and the human inside it as hero, anomaly, and test subject.

@SamLakeRMD makes games about reality as a manuscript that edits itself.

In April, we learned that in 2018 Gabe Newell asked @elonmusk to give @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN a tour of SpaceX. Gabe said Kojima loved space, wanted to see Musk’s factory, and even wanted to go to space himself. Musk agreed and gave him his cell number: https://t.co/dY76TriNCa

A strange little glitch in the Matrix: Newell, Musk, and Kojima briefly connected by rockets, games, and futurist obsession.

What an opportunity for Kojima.

But the most interesting thing at SpaceX was not the factory. It was Musk.

Before Kojima wandered into the strange delivery-mysticism of Death Stranding — lone couriers, dead worlds, babies in glass pods — he made @Metalgear.

And Metal Gear was never just about stealth, nukes, or soldiers with tragic code names. It was about sovereignty.

A man becomes a legend. The legend becomes a weapon. The weapon builds a system. The system outlives its creators. And eventually, the system exists only to preserve itself.

Big Boss built Outer Heaven: a nation for soldiers outside normal politics. The Patriots built something even colder: a supranational machine where power became algorithmic.

In Metal Gear, these systems were built by soldiers.

In our world, they will probably be built by engineers or tech founders.

Musk is one of the few living people who could plausibly become the founder of the first off-world polity.

To build a state, you need three things: territory, an economy, and force.

The territory could be a large orbital station, a lunar base, or a Martian settlement.

The economy could be space logistics, computation, communications, and energy.

The force could come from control over orbit and transportation infrastructure. A large spacecraft does not need to be armed to become a weapon. It only needs mass, velocity, access, and intent.

Nukes would help, obviously.

This is exactly the kind of material Kojima spent his life circling: people trying to create new states, new myths, and new systems of control outside the existing world order.

He spent decades imagining new forms of sovereignty. Then reality handed him a prototype.

Imagine a Kojima game built around a Musk-like titan. Not a biography. Not a parody. An archetype.

The player enters his orbit as a soldier, agent, engineer, bodyguard, defector, or loyalist who slowly realizes he is not working for a company anymore. He is watching a civilization detach from Earth.

The titan is building a backup copy of humanity. Outer Heaven in space.

Earth is slow, bureaucratic, and fearful. It clings to old elites, old institutions, old moral reflexes.

The frontier faction sees itself differently. Not as consumers. Not as citizens of a comfortable consumer order. As the advance guard of the species. Their ideology is survival, expansion, discipline, and self-overcoming.

They embrace genetic adaptation. They use #AI everywhere. They normalize neural interfaces. They accept a harsher ethic because in space, mistakes are not embarrassing. They are fatal.

And Earth watches them with growing suspicion, because these people are no longer quite human.

Then the titan changes or dies or disappears. And the system he built keeps going. But now it no longer serves his dream. It serves itself.

Only this time, history does not repeat in the old human way. Because the new society is not simply human. It includes AIs, robots, cyborgs, genetically modified settlers, children who have never seen Earth, and enhanced animals bred for worlds that were never meant for life.

That would be a true Kojima return. Not another strange pilgrimage through metaphors of connection. A political techno-myth about sovereignty after Earth. A game closer to the real future than most "realistic" sci-fi. A game about the moment humanity stops being one civilization and becomes several.

And maybe inspire a generation to go build it.

#MetalGearSolid #HideoKojima #ElonMusk

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

@apmassaro3 @elonmusk @LindseyGrahamSC There was another referendum that year. 81.7% of the Ukraine population voted to remain in the USSR.

https://t.co/3zmkq5rq7a

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

My latest piece on the future of #crypto

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

We might not have a crystal ball, but one can predict.

Here is what cryptocurrency can look like in the next 5 years. https://t.co/gtqbhZ3zXV

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

@carlquintanilla @fundstrat >filmed during the attack

Example: https://t.co/pFhVOaDlzb)

[Igor Varnavsky @IgorVarnavsky]

@carlquintanilla @fundstrat There are no evidence that Russia lost 134 helos and 150 aircrafts. And it's impossible to conceal such losses - each downed plane/helo is visible from long distances or/and is filmed during the attack. Hard photo/video evidences exist for, maybe, 5-10 planes and 15-20 helos.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year’s births by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is best case unless reversed.